Orion Health among customers using new Amazon HealthLake

SECTOR UPDATE – Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services has announced Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations. Amazon HealthLake aggregates an organization’s complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralized AWS data lake and automatically normalizes this information using machine learning.

The service identifies each piece of clinical information, tags, and indexes events in a timeline view with standardized labels so it can be easily searched, and structures all of the data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format for a complete view of the health of individual patients and entire populations. As a result, Amazon HealthLake makes it easier for customers to query, perform analytics, and run machine learning to derive meaningful value from the newly normalized data.

Organizations such as healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, and more can use Amazon HealthLake to help spot trends and anomalies in health data so they can make much more precise predictions about the progression of disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the accuracy of insurance premiums, and many other applications.

Orion Health is a global, award-winning provider of health information technology, advancing population health and precision medicine solutions for the delivery of care across the entire health ecosystem.

“At Orion Health, we believe that there is significant untapped potential to transform the healthcare sector by improving how technology is used and providing insights into the data being generated. We are pleased to find a like-minded company in AWS who, with Amazon HealthLake, is now taking the next step in using machine learning to help make sense of health data in a secure, complaint, and auditable way,” said Anne O'Hanlon, Product Director, Orion Health.

“Data is frequently messy and incomplete, which is costly and time consuming to clean up. We are excited to work alongside AWS to deliver new ways for patients to interact with the healthcare system, supporting initiatives such as the 21st Century Cures Act designed to make healthcare more accessible and affordable, and Digital Front Door, which aims to improve health outcomes by helping patients receive the perfect care for them from the comfort of their home. Expanding the relationship we enjoy with AWS gives us an opportunity to innovate and explore new ways to deliver patient-centered healthcare and high quality health outcomes that help people live a healthier life.”  

Amazon HealthLake offers medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies a service that brings together and makes sense of all their patient data, so healthcare organizations can make more precise predictions about the health of patients and populations. The new HIPAA-eligible service enables organizations to store, tag, index, standardize, query, and apply machine learning to analyze data at petabyte scale in the cloud.

Amazon HealthLake allows organizations to easily copy health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud and normalize every patient record across disparate formats automatically. Upon ingestion, Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning trained to understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information, index events into a timeline view, and enrich the data with standardized labels (e.g., medications, conditions, diagnoses, procedures, etc.) so all this information can be easily searched.

“There has been an explosion of digitized health data in recent years with the advent of electronic medical records, but organizations are telling us that unlocking the value from this information using technology like machine learning is still challenging and riddled with barriers,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS.

“With Amazon HealthLake, healthcare organizations can reduce the time it takes to transform health data in the cloud from weeks to minutes so that it can be analyzed securely, even at petabyte scale. This completely reinvents what’s possible with healthcare and brings us that much closer to everyone’s goal of providing patients with more personalized and predictive treatment for individuals and across entire populations.”